THE SARACEN'S HEAD[143]
[143] From _Tait's Magazine_ for December 1839.--M.
My first visit to the Wordsworths had been made in November, 1807;
but, on that occasion, from the necessity of saving the Michaelmas
Term at Oxford, for which I had barely left myself time, I stayed only
one week. On the last day, I witnessed a scene, the first and the last
of its kind that ever I _did_ witness, almost too trivial to mention,
except for the sake of showing what things occur in the realities of
experience which a novelist could not venture to imagine. Wordsworth
and his sister were under an engagement of some standing to dine on
that day with a literary lady about four miles distant; and, as the
southern mail, which I was to catch at a distance of eighteen miles,
would not pass that point until long after midnight, Miss Wordsworth
proposed that, rather than pass my time at an inn, I should join the
dinner party; a proposal rather more suitable to her own fervent and
hospitable temper than to the habits of our hostess, who must (from
what I came to know of her in after years) have looked upon me as an
intruder. Something _had_ reached Miss Wordsworth of her penurious
_ménage_, but nothing that approached the truth. I was presented to the
lady, whom we found a perfect _bas bleu_ of a very commonplace order,
but having some other accomplishments beyond her slender acquaintance
with literature. Our party consisted of six--our hostess, who might
be about fifty years of age; a pretty timid young woman, who was
there in the character of a humble friend; some stranger or other;
the Wordsworths, and myself. The dinner was the very humblest and
simplest I had ever seen--in that there was nothing to offend--I did
not then know that the lady was very rich--but also it was flagrantly
insufficient in quantity. Dinner, however, proceeded; when, without any
removals, in came a kind of second course, in the shape of a solitary
pheasant. This, in a cold manner, she asked me to try; but we, in our
humility, declined for the present; and also in mere good-nature, not
wishing to expose too palpably the insufficiency of her dinner. May I
die the death of a traitor, if she did not proceed, without further
question to any one of us (and, as to the poor young companion, no
form of even invitation was conceded to her), and, in the eyes of
us all, eat up the whole bird, from alpha to omega. Upon my honour,
I thought to myself, this is a scene I would not have missed. It is
well to know the possibilities of human nature. Could she have a bet
depending on the issue, and would she explain all to us as soon as she
had won her wager? Alas! no explanation ever came, except, indeed, that
afterwards her character, put _en evidence_ upon a score of occasions,
too satisfactorily explained everything. No; it was, as Mr. Coleridge
expresses it, a psychological curiosity--a hollow thing--and only once
matched in all the course of my reading, in or out of romances; but
that once, I grieve to say it, was by a king, and a sort of hero.
The Duchess of Marlborough it is who reports the shocking anecdote
of William III, that actually Princess Anne, his future wife, durst
not take any of the green peas brought to the dinner table, when that
vegetable happened to be as yet scarce and premature. _There_ was a
gentleman! And such a lady had we for our hostess. However, we all
observed a suitable gravity; but afterwards, when we left the house,
the remembrance affected us differently. Miss Wordsworth laughed with
undissembled glee; but Wordsworth thought it too grave a matter for
laughing--he was thoroughly disgusted, and said repeatedly, "A person
cannot be honest, positively not honest, who is capable of such an
act." The lady is dead, and I shall not mention her name: she lived
only to gratify her selfish propensities; and two little anecdotes
may show the outrageous character of her meanness. I was now on the
debtor side of her dinner account, and, therefore, in a future year she
readily accepted an invitation to come and dine with me at my cottage.
But, on a subsequent occasion, when I was to have a few literary people
at dinner, whom I knew that she greatly wished to meet, she positively
replied thus:--"No; I have already come with my young lady to dine
with you; that puts me on the wrong side by one; now, if I were to
come again, as I cannot leave Miss ---- behind, I shall then be on the
wrong side by three; and that is more than I could find opportunities
to repay before I go up to London for the winter." "Very well," I said;
"give me 3s. and _that_ will settle the account." She laughed, but
positively persisted in not coming until after dinner, notwithstanding
she had to drive a distance of ten miles.
The other anecdote is worse. She was exceedingly careful of her health;
and not thinking it healthy to drive about in a close carriage,--which,
besides, could not have suited the narrow mountain tracks, to which
her sketching habits attracted her,--she shut up her town carriage for
the summer, and jobbed some little open car. Being a very large woman,
and, moreover, a masculine woman, with a bronzed complexion, and always
choosing to wear, at night, a turban, round hair that was as black
as that of the "Moors of Malabar," she presented an exact likeness
of a Saracen's Head, as painted over inn-doors; whilst the timid and
delicate young lady by her side looked like "dejected Pity" at the side
of "Revenge" when assuming the war-denouncing trumpet. Some Oxonians
and Cantabs, who, at different times, were in the habit of meeting this
oddly assorted party in all nooks of the country, used to move the
question, whether the poor horse or the young lady had the worst of it?
At length the matter was decided: the horse was fast going off this
sublunary stage; and the Saracen's Head was told as much, and with this
little addition,--that his death was owing _inter alia_ to starvation.
Her answer was remarkable:--"But, my dear madam, that is his master's
fault; I pay so much a-day--he is to keep the horse." That might be,
but still the horse was dying, and dying in the way stated. The
Saracen's Head persisted in using him under those circumstances--such
was her "bond"--and in a short time the horse actually died. Yes, the
horse died--and died of starvation--or at least of an illness caused
originally by starvation: for so said, not merely the whole population
of the little neighbouring town, but also the surgeon. Not long after,
however, the lady, the Saracen's Head, died herself; but I fear _not_
of starvation; for, though something like it did prevail at her table,
she prudently reserved it all for her guests; in fact, I never heard
of such vigilant care, and so much laudable exertion, applied to the
promotion of health: yet all failed, and, in a degree which confounded
people's speculations upon the subject--for she did not live much
beyond sixty; whereas everybody supposed that the management of her
physical system entitled her to outwear a century. Perhaps the prayers
of horses might avail to order it otherwise.
But the singular thing about this lady's mixed and contradictory
character was, that in London and Bath, where her peculiar habits
of life were naturally less accurately known, she maintained the
reputation of one who united the accomplishments of literature and art
with a remarkable depth of sensibility, and a most amiable readiness
to enter into the distresses of her friends by sympathy the most
cordial and consolation the most delicate. More than once I have
seen her name recorded in printed books, and attended with praises
that tended to this effect. I have seen letters also from a lady in
deep affliction which spoke of the Saracen's Head as having paid her
the first visit from which she drew any effectual consolation. Such
are the erroneous impressions conveyed by biographical memoirs; or,
which is a more charitable construction of the case, such are the
inconsistencies of the human heart! And certainly there was one fact,
even in her Westmoreland life, that _did_ lend some countenance to the
southern picture of her amiableness: and this lay in the cheerfulness
with which she gave up her time (_time_, but not much of her redundant
money) to the promotion of the charitable schemes set on foot by the
neighbouring ladies; sometimes for the education of poor children,
sometimes for the visiting of the sick, &c., &c. I have heard several
of those ladies express their gratitude for her exertions, and
declare that she was about their best member. But their horror was
undisguised when the weekly committee came, by rotation, to hold its
sittings at her little villa; for, as the business occupied them
frequently from eleven o'clock in the forenoon to a late dinner hour,
and as many of them had a fifteen or twenty miles' drive, they needed
some refreshments: but these were, of course, a "great idea" at the
Saracen's Head; since, according to the epigram which illustrates the
maxim of Tacitus that _omne ignotum pro magnifico_, and, applying it
to the case of a miser's horse, terminates by saying, "What vast ideas
must he have of oats!"--upon the same principle these poor ladies,
on those fatal committee days, never failed to form most exaggerated
ideas of bread, butter, and wine. And at length some, more intrepid
than the rest, began to carry biscuits in their muffs, and, with the
conscious tremors of school girls (profiting by the absence of the
mistress but momentarily expecting detection), they employed some
casual absence of their unhostly hostess in distributing and eating
their hidden "viaticum." However, it must be acknowledged, that time
and exertion, and the sacrifice of more selfish pleasure during the
penance at the school, were, after all, real indications of kindness
to her fellow-creatures; and, as I wish to part in peace even with
the Saracen's Head, I have reserved this anecdote to the last: for
it is painful to have lived on terms of good nature, and exchanging
civilities, with any human being of whom one can report absolutely _no_
good thing; and I sympathize heartily with that indulgent person of
whom it is somewhere recorded that, upon an occasion when the death of
a man happened to be mentioned who was unanimously pronounced a wretch
without one good quality, "_monstrum nullâ virtute redemptum_," he
ventured, however, at last, in a deprecatory tone to say--"Well, he did
_whistle_ beautifully, at any rate."
Talking of "whistling" reminds me to return from my digression; for on
that night, the 12th of November, 1807, and the last of my visits to
the Wordsworths, I took leave of them in the inn at Ambleside about
ten at night; and the post-chaise in which I crossed the country to
catch the mail was driven by a postilion who whistled so delightfully
that, for the first time in my life, I became aware of the prodigious
powers which are lodged potentially in so despised a function of the
vocal organs. For the whole of the long ascent up Orrest Head, which
obliged him to walk his horses for a full half-mile, he made the woods
of Windermere ring with the canorous sweetness of his half flute,
half clarionet music; but, in fact, the subtle melody of the effect
placed it in power far beyond either flute or clarionet. A year or two
afterwards, I heard a fellow-servant of this same postilion's, a black,
play with equal superiority of effect upon the jew's harp; making that,
which in most hands is a mere monotonous jarring, a dull reverberating
vibration, into a delightful lyre of no inconsiderable compass. We
have since heard of, some of us have heard, the chinchopper. Within
the last hundred years, we have had the Æolian harp (first mentioned
and described in the "Castle of Indolence," which I think was first
published entire about 1738[144]); then the musical glasses; then the
_celestina_, to represent the music of the spheres, introduced by Mr.
Walker, or some other lecturing astronomer; and many another fine
effect obtained from trivial means. But, at this moment, I recollect a
performance perhaps more astonishing than any of them. A Mr. Worgman,
who had very good introductions, and very general ones (for he was
to be met within a few months in every part of the island), used to
accompany himself on the piano, weaving _extempore_ long tissues of
impassioned music, that were called his own, but which, in fact,
were all the better for not being such, or at least for continually
embodying passages from Handel and Pergolesi. To this substratum of
the instrumental music he contrived to adapt some unaccountable and
indescribable choral accompaniment, a pomp of sound, a tempestuous
blare of harmony ascending in clouds not from any one, but apparently
from a band of Mr. Worgman's; for sometimes it was a trumpet, sometimes
a kettle-drum, sometimes a cymbal, sometimes a bassoon, and sometimes
it was all of these at once.
"And now 'twas like all instruments;
And now it was a flute;
And now it was an angel's voice,
That maketh the heavens be mute."
In this case I presume that ventriloquism must have had something to
do with the effect; but, whatever it were, the power varied greatly
with the state of his spirits, or with some other fluctuating causes in
the animal economy. However, the result of all these experiences is,
that I shall never more be surprised at any musical effects, the very
greatest, drawn from whatever inconsiderable or apparently inadequate
means; not even if the butcher's instrument, the marrow-bones and
cleaver, or any of those culinary instruments so pleasantly treated by
Addison in the "Spectator," such as the kitchen dresser and thumb, the
tongs and shovel, the pepper and salt-box, should be exalted, by some
immortal butcher or inspired scullion, into a sublime harp, dulcimer,
or lute, capable of wooing St. Cecilia to listen, able even
"To raise a mortal to the skies,
Or draw an angel down."
That night, as I was passing under the grounds of Elleray, then
belonging to a Westmoreland "statesman," a thought struck me, that I
was now traversing a road with which, as yet, I was scarcely at all
acquainted, but which, in years to come, might perhaps be as familiar
to my eye as the rooms of my own house; and possibly that I might
traverse them in company with faces as yet not even seen by me, but
in those future years dearer than any which I had yet known. In this
prophetic glimpse there was nothing very marvellous; for what could be
more natural than that I should come to reside in the neighbourhood of
the Wordsworths, and that this might lead to my forming connexions in
a country which I should consequently come to know so well? I did not,
however, anticipate so definitely and circumstantially as all this;
but generally I had a dim presentiment that here, on this very road,
I should often pass, and in company that, now not even conjecturally
delineated or drawn out of the utter darkness in which they were as
yet reposing, would hereafter plant memories in my heart, the last
that will fade from it in the hour of death. Here, afterwards, at this
very spot, or a little above it, but on this very estate, which from
local peculiarities of ground, and of sudden angles, was peculiarly
_kenspeck_, _i.e._ easy of recognition,[145] and could have been
challenged and identified at any distance of years; here afterwards
lived Professor Wilson, the only very intimate male friend I have
had; here, too, it was, my M.,[146] that, in long years afterwards,
through many a score of nights--nights often dark as Erebus, and amidst
thunders and lightnings the most sublime--we descended at twelve, one,
and two o'clock at night, speeding from Kendal to our distant home,
twenty miles away. Thou wert at present a child not nine years old, nor
had I seen thy face, nor heard thy name. But within nine years from
that same night thou wert seated by my side;--and, thenceforwards,
through a period of fourteen years, how often did we two descend,
hand locked in hand, and thinking of things to come, at a pace of
hurricane; whilst all the sleeping woods about us re-echoed the uproar
of trampling hoofs and groaning wheels. Duly as we mounted the crest of
Orrest Head, mechanically and of themselves almost, and spontaneously,
without need of voice or spur, according to Westmoreland usage, the
horses flew off into a gallop, like the pace of a swallow.[147] It
was a railroad pace that we ever maintained; objects were descried
far ahead in one moment, and in the next were crowding into the rear.
Three miles and a half did this storm-flight continue, for so long the
descent lasted. Then, for many a mile, over undulating ground, did we
alternately creep and fly, until again a long precipitous movement,
again a storm-gallop, that hardly suffered the feet to touch the
ground, gave warning that we drew near to that beloved cottage; warning
to us--warning to them:--
"The silence that is here
Is of the grave, and of austere
But happy feelings of the dead."
Sometimes the nights were bright with cloudless moonlight, and of
that awful breathless quiet which often broods over vales that are
peculiarly landlocked, and which is, or seems to be, so much more
expressive of a solemn hush and a Sabbath-like rest from the labours of
nature than I remember to have experienced in flat countries:--
"It is not quiet--is not peace--
But something deeper far than these."
And on such nights it was no sentimental refinement, but a sincere
and hearty feeling, that, in wheeling past the village churchyard of
Stavely, something like an outrage seemed offered to the sanctity of
its graves by the uproar of our career. Sometimes the nights were of
that pitchy darkness which is more palpable and unfathomable wherever
hills intercept the gleaming of light which otherwise is usually seen
to linger about the horizon in the northern quarter; and then arose in
perfection that striking effect when the glare of lamps searches for
one moment every dark recess of the thickets, forces them into sudden,
almost daylight, revelation, only to leave them within the twinkling of
the eye in darkness more profound; making them, like the snow-flakes
falling upon a cataract, "one moment bright, then gone for ever." But,
dark or moonlight alike, in every instance throughout so long a course
of years, the road was entirely our own for the whole twenty miles.
After nine o'clock not many people are abroad, after ten absolutely
none, upon the roads of Westmoreland; a circumstance which gives a
peculiar solemnity to a traveller's route amongst these quiet valleys
upon a summer evening of latter May, of June, or early July; since, in
a latitude so much higher than that of London, broad daylight prevails
to an hour long after nine. Nowhere is the holiness of vesper hours
more deeply felt.
[144] The _Castle of Indolence_ was first published in 1748, the
year of the poet's death. The following is the stanza of the poem
referred to by De Quincey:--
"A certain music, never known before,
Here lull'd the pensive, melancholy mind;
Full easily obtained. Behoves no more
But sidelong to the gently-waving wind
To lay the well-tuned instrument reclined,
From which, with airy flying fingers light,
Beyond each mortal touch the most refined;
The god of winds drew sounds of deep delight;
Whence, with just cause, the Harp of Æolus it hight."--M.
[145] The usual Scottish word is _kenspeckle_.--M.
[146] His future wife, Margaret Simpson.--M.
[147] It may be supposed, not literally, for the swallow (or at
least that species called the swift) has been known to fly at the
rate of 300 miles an hour. Very probably, however, this pace was
not deduced from an entire hour's performance, but estimated by
proportion from a flight of one or two minutes. An interesting
anecdote is told by the gentleman (I believe the Rev. E. Stanley)
who described in _Blackwood's_ _Magazine_ the opening of the
earliest English railway, viz. that a bird (snipe was it, or
field-fare, or plover?) ran, or rather flew, a race with the
engine for three or four miles, until, finding itself likely to be
beaten, it then suddenly wheeled away into the moors. And now, in
1839, from all these flying journeys and their stinging
remembrances, hardly a wreck survives of what composed their
living equipage: the men who chiefly drove in those days (for I
have ascertained it) are gone; the horses are gone; darkness rests
upon all, except myself. I, woe is me! am the solitary survivor
from scenes that now seem to me as fugitive as the flying lights
from our lamps as they shot into the forest recesses. God forbid
that on such a theme I should seem to affect sentimentalism! It is
from overmastering recollections that I look back on those distant
days; and chiefly I have suffered myself to give way before the
impulse that haunts me of reverting to those bitter, bitter
thoughts, in order to notice one singular waywardness or caprice
(as it might seem) incident to the situation, which, I doubt not,
besieges many more people than myself: it is, that I find a more
poignant suffering, a pang more searching, in going back, not to
those enjoyments themselves, and the days when they were within my
power, but to times anterior, when as yet they did not exist; nay,
when some who were chiefly concerned in them as parties had not
even been born. No night, I might almost say, of my whole life,
remains so profoundly, painfully, and pathetically imprinted on my
remembrance as this very one, on which I tried prelusively, as it
were, that same road in solitude, and lulled by the sweet
carollings of the postilion, which, _after_ an interval of ten
years, and _through_ a period of more than equal duration, it was
destined that I should so often traverse in circumstances of
happiness too radiant, that for me are burned out for ever.
Coleridge told me of a similar case that had fallen within his
knowledge, and the impassioned expression which the feelings
belonging to it drew from a servant woman at Keswick:--She had
nursed some boy, either of his or of Mr. Southey's; the boy had
lived apart from the rest of the family, secluded with his nurse
in her cottage; she was dotingly fond of him; lived, in short,
_by_ him, as well as for him; and nearly ten years of her life had
been exalted into one golden dream by his companionship. At length
came the day which severed the connexion; and she, in the anguish
of the separation, bewailing her future loneliness, and knowing
too well that education and the world, if it left him some kind
remembrances of her, never could restore him to her arms the same
fond loving boy that felt no shame in surrendering his whole heart
to caressing and being caressed, did not revert to any day or
season of her ten years' happiness, but went back to the very day
of his arrival, a particular Thursday, and to an hour when, as
yet, she had not seen him, exclaiming--"O that Thursday! O that it
could come back! that Thursday when the chaise-wheels were ringing
in the streets of Keswick; when yet I had not seen his bonny face;
but when _he_ was coming!"
Ay, reader, all this may sound foolishness to you, that perhaps never
had a heartache, or that may have all your blessings to come. But now
let me return to my narrative. After about twelve months' interval, and
therefore again in November, but November of the year 1808, I repeated
my visit to Wordsworth, and upon a longer scale. I found him removed
from his cottage to a house of considerable size, about three-quarters
of a mile distant, called Allan Bank. This house had been very recently
erected, at an expense of about £1500, by a gentleman from Liverpool,
a merchant, and also a lawyer in some department or other. It was
not yet completely finished; and an odd accident was reported to
me as having befallen it in its earliest stage. The walls had been
finished, and this event was to be celebrated at the village inn
with an _ovation_, previously to the _triumph_ that would follow on
the roof-raising. The workmen had all housed themselves at the _Red
Lion_, and were beginning their carouse, when up rode a traveller,
who brought them the unseasonable news, that, whilst riding along the
vale, he had beheld the downfall of the whole building. Out the men
rushed, hoping that this might be a hoax; but too surely they found his
report true, and their own festival premature. A little malice mingled
unavoidably with the laughter of the Dalesmen; for it happened that
the Liverpool gentleman had offered a sort of insult to the native
artists, by bringing down both masons and carpenters from his own
town; an unwise plan, for they were necessarily unacquainted with many
points of local skill; and it was to some ignorance in their mode of
laying the stones that the accident was due. The house had one or two
capital defects--it was cold, damp, and, to all appearance, incurably
smoky. Upon this latter defect, by the way, Wordsworth founded a claim,
not for diminution of rent, but absolutely for entire immunity from
any rent at all. It was truly comical to hear him argue the point
with the Liverpool proprietor, Mr. C. He went on dilating on the
hardship of living in such a house; of the injury, or suffering, at
least, sustained by the eyes; until, at last, he had drawn a picture
of himself as a very ill-used man; and I seriously expected to hear
him sum up by demanding a round sum for damages. Mr. C. was a very
good-natured man, calm, and gentlemanlike in his manners. He had also a
considerable respect for Wordsworth, derived, it may be supposed, not
from his writings, but from the authority (which many more besides him
could not resist) of his conversation. However, he looked grave and
perplexed. Nor do I know how the matter ended; but I mention it as an
illustration of Wordsworth's keen spirit of business. Whilst foolish
people supposed him a mere honeyed sentimentalist, speaking only in
zephyrs and bucolics, he was in fact a somewhat hard pursuer of what he
thought fair advantages.
In the February which followed, I left Allan Bank; but, upon Miss
Wordsworth's happening to volunteer the task of furnishing for my use
the cottage so recently occupied by her brother's family, I took it
upon a seven years' lease. And thus it happened--this I mean was the
mode of it (for, at any rate, I should have settled somewhere in the
country)--that I became a resident in Grasmere.